The New Yorker & Me: The "I" in Journalism

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

The "I" in Journalism - Fact or Fiction?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

I’ve been thinking about an observation that Peter Schjeldahl makes in his “77 Sunset Me” (The New Yorker, December 23, 2019: “Do you imagine that writers speak ‘as themselves’? No such selves exist.” Janet Malcolm says something similar in the Afterword of her The Journalist and the Murderer (1990): “The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention.”

With the greatest respect, I think this is poppycock. It better be, or the credibility of everything Schjeldahl and Malcolm have written is undermined. When Schjeldahl, in his great “The Flip Side” (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010) says, “The Met’s show of Jan Gossart (also known as Mabuse) is artistically no great shakes—Gossart brought Italian influences to bear on an Antwerp style that had roots in van Eyck, to an energetic yet decadent effect—but I found myself savoring its sheer quantity of delicate lumber,” who is doing the savoring – Schjeldahl or some fictive double named “Schjeldahl”? Come on!

When Malcolm, in her superb “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010), says, “Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist. I meddled with the story I was reporting. I entered it as a character who could affect its plot. I picked up the phone and called Stephen Scaring’s office,” is she not speaking as her real self? Who picked up that phone – Malcolm or “Malcolm”? To me the answer is obvious. “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” is a fact piece; therefore, the “I” in it is Malcolm herself. The same applies to Schjeldahl’s “I” in “The Flip Side.” To conclude otherwise is to cross the line into fiction. That’s not an option for works that represent themselves as journalism.